My development interview nightmare: “We’re family friendly”
I created my Mr. Anne Dev account for the sole purpose of being able to speak my mind and not suffer from repercussions afterward. With that out of the way, let’s talk interviews.
I’ve interviewed some good 100 companies in the past few years. Why so many? You might ask. Well, it’s become a hobby. More importantly, I started out naively applying for job after job when I wanted to get a good role and then following up on those applications with interviews.
During that time, I’ve had my fair share of interesting interviews. Let’s start off this nightmare list with the guy I call “We’re family friendly”.
We’re family friendly
Possibly the best job I’ve turned down. Or rather, the job I’m the gladdest I turned down (is that a word? Gladdest?). Let me give you some expo real quick. The company was a startup in the sports/medical field, completely bootstrap, but with heavy-hitter clients that were about to become paying clients. It was ripe for some seed money and opening up to investors.
Their product was pretty interesting (it was a physical product) but its software was what interested me. So I applied after a friend recommended the company to me (he had just been hired on for contract).
I drove up to the building, far from downtown, parked my car, took the elevator and found the quaint little office. The interview took place pretty late, 6pm I think but it was abuzz with activity. Good sign? Nope.
After I walked in, I was met with a bare office with only a few desks and macs all around. Of course, you can’t have a tech startup without macs. After speaking to the CEO, I was informed that the CTO wasn’t interviewing me.
Oh fuck, I thought. Non-technical CEO doing technical interviews? That spelled disaster. And oh boy, it was.
First, the CEO spent about 20 minutes talking about their products and how awesome they are. And another 10 minutes about how awesome their absent CTO was. After a quick discussion about my skills, which he did not understand whatsoever, we moved onto discussing the job itself.
Okay, wait, wait. He did not understand any of my skills? That’s right. He had no idea what MySQL was, or PostgreSQL, or PHP. At some point, he heard “jQuery” — “Oh we use that hear. I’ve never seen an engineer as good at his job as our CTO”. This was when React was coming out. Yeah.
Anyways, not to bash on jQuery, we moved on. I asked him what the typical day looked like,
“We all get here between 8am and 10am, we have a flexible schedule.”
Great! Do you allow remote working?
“No, we believe you have to work together as a team. Sometimes, one of us calls out and we join in.”
Huh, okay.
“Then we all leave around 6–9pm to go home.”
Wait, so how many hours do you put in a week?
“Around 70–80 hours. But we’re really family friendly. If you have something going on, like [x] over here sometimes goes to his kid’s soccer practice, you can take off.”
Oh okay.
“You’re welcome to come in on Saturday to make that up.”
My jaw dropped on the floor. Or would have but I retained my composure. We had a quick discussion about how long they were keeping up this “crunch” time and he said it wasn’t crunch time and that they all regularly worked 70–80 hours.
I politely told him that I don’t know if I could keep that up and cited a few studied that showed working more than 45 hours a week meant lesser productivity, mistakes, issues with code, and well, it was detrimental not just to the person but the codebase. He then proceeded to tell me that he had a newborn at home and how much he’s sacrificing (not as much as his wife I bet).
“There’s a lot at stake. I poured my life savings into this.”
Yeah, well, I didn’t. And maybe you shouldn’t have either.
I asked next about salary, it was pretty important to me as I was leaving a pretty cushy job. Obviously, I wasn’t going to take the job but hey, maybe if they paid well.
Mind you, this was a senior role, he told me that they’re willing to pay up to 6 figures. UP TO 6 figures. According to Salary.com, Glassdoor.com, and my previous years of interviewing in the city, the average rate for a MID-LEVEL engineer was 90K+. A senior level was 6 figures flat. I now know who is bringing down the average.
I countered with my expected 6 figures plus some and he seemed to be used to that response. I thought to myself that I should see this through at least for shits and giggles. I mean, my friend recommended this gig and this was just so horrible I could laugh.
I asked him what’s next and he told me something incredible. He wanted me to come work with them for 3–5 days at little to no compensation.
I couldn’t believe it. I asked him how I could possibly work there for 3–5 days with a full-time job, “Why don’t you come after? You could work with us 5–9 in the evening for a couple of weeks. Or you could come in on weekends.”
I left.
So what happened afterward?
The aftermath is just as hilarious and horrible as the actual interview. I did their code challenge, partly because I needed more projects on Github. Afterward, I got a call that they would be “willing to work with me” if I could put in at least 50 hours a week, and 70–80 during crunch time (which was coming up and lasted up to a month).
He also countered my salary with a much lower number but still decent. I’ll give him that.
After I submitted my code challenge, they rejected me within a couple of weeks because they found a better applicant.
My friend’s contract expired and I retold him the story. He told me his story.
They did have a jQuery app base of tens of thousands of lines of code, all spaghetti code. No development pipeline, often working on production. No testing, no staging server, no code standards, and no one to even QA the app after deployments (Oh, I meant FTP uploads).
To set this into a good timeframe, the same year, React was released. I had already been using Gulp, Docker, Mocha, Karma, and other tools that are associated with modern Javascript development.
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